


Practical Apiculture: or, On Establishing Merit

by KittyBarclay



Category: Mary Russell - Laurie R. King, Sherlock Holmes & Related Fandoms, Sherlock Holmes - Arthur Conan Doyle
Genre: Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Gen
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-02-10
Updated: 2017-03-07
Packaged: 2018-09-23 05:37:04
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 10,845
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9642881
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/KittyBarclay/pseuds/KittyBarclay
Summary: He is a detective trying his damnedest to transition gracefully into retirement when a strange case of forgery brings him back into the world. She is a young woman on the edge of adulthood, trying to find a place for herself in a world that moves too slowly and values all of the wrong things.They fight crime.





	1. The Obvious

**Author's Note:**

> Just to be clear here: this has absolutely nothing to do with the BBC Sherlock series. If you're looking for that Holmes, I'm sorry but you're going to be disappointed. I hope you'll stay and give this one a chance, though.

“Oh, for God’s sake, Sherlock! This is getting ridiculous.”

There was the sound of worn leather creaking in alarm, and a frantic flurry of dust motes chased each other around in enthusiastic circles at the far edges of Sherlock’s peripheral vision. He ignored them, both the indications of and the significance of John’s sudden collapse into his armchair, in favor of staring intently out the window.

It was raining out, only just begun, and the men and women on the street below were moving desperately to adjust. Like ants, many would say, because many people were idiots; ants never blundered around blindly the way people did, desperately fashioning impromptu umbrellas out of newspapers and briefcases, accelerating and braking at asinine rates as they attempted to compensate for newly-slick roads. Ants, for all their lack of traditional intelligence, had purpose. They moved in service to the colony, with a single-minded focus that Sherlock was inclined to consider noble, on his more charitable days. No actions wasted with ants, no stupid unnecessary questions or pointless, obvious lies. Mankind had one or two things to learn from them.

And from bees.

“ - and are you even listening to me any more?”

Sherlock turned, one eyebrow raised, just as John sighed in resignation and pressed three fingers to the bridge of his nose.

“No,” he replied, arching the brow slightly higher for emphasis. “No, of course not - but I hardly need to, John. I already know what you’ve said and I really don’t know why you insist on repeating yourself so pedantically.” In the armchair, John was shaking his head, breathing with melodramatic regularity. “Just because something was worthy of my attentions the first time around does not make it interesting the second time around - especially the second time around. The man you brought me two days ago was nothing more than an unimaginative clone of the pawnbroker’s wife from last April, substituting a parakeet for the Renoir, naturally. The fact that it wasn’t immediately apparent to you is surely more cause for concern about _your_ mental well-being than my own.”

He spun twice in place, snatching his violin on the second rotation, and plucked out a series of pentatonic scales before setting the instrument down on the window ledge.

“I’m not going through a crisis of any sort, and certainly not one related to my age proportional to my projected lifetime; I have no need for a car in London, and even if I did, BMW has been outperforming Porsche for the last seven and a half years; and I am not getting more picky over the years, people are simply running out of ways to commit interesting crimes. And even if I _were_ becoming more thorough in my screening process …” Sherlock thrust his hands into his pockets, where they remained calmly for an admirable eighth of a second before reaching out to pick up and then quickly discard a scrap of greaseproof paper, “… it would only be because I am mired in tedium, John. 

"My mind is an instrument, it cannot sit idle playing and replaying Dancla’s Opus 84 and expect to maintain its brilliance. I need a _challenge_ , John; I need a chase.”

He paused, frowning.

“It was hardly vigorous enough to count as an explosion, anyway.”

“It knocked a two foot hole in the wall,” John commented, voice bland; the epitome of reason, that man, and far too frequently correct for Sherlock’s present tastes. He waved a dismissive hand.

“Pah.”

“And knocked half of the tiles loose in the downstairs kitchen.”

“A man will be in tomorrow to take care of that.”

“You probably frightened Mrs. Hudson half to death!”

“I did no such thing!” Sherlock snorted indignantly. “Mrs. Hudson is made of far sterner stuff than that, and you know it. She barely even screamed.”

“Well, you would have done with me,” John muttered, shaking his head. The hand dropped, though, and a sliver of lightness filtered into his tone; he was amused in spite of the maddening disapproval, although Sherlock wasn’t entirely sure that that constituted an improvement.

“Listen,” he continued, cutting Sherlock off before he could begin to analyze aloud the relative merits of John’s vs Mrs. Hudson’s demonstrated constitutions, “I - I don’t care. I know you have your reasons, and I’m sorry that I’m not around as much to distract you - although you could have found a new flatmate -”

“Ridiculous,” Sherlock muttered. “The availability of your bedroom was the only worthwhile part of your leaving, I’m not going to sacrifice my privacy and my laboratory -”

“Well, then,” John hurried on, sounding almost desperate, “that’s your own fault as well. I know you don’t particularly care about helping mankind, and I know you don’t really need the money, but if you don’t start actually taking cases, Sherlock, I swear to god someone will murder you just to make you - _stop fidgeting_ \- and I will be very hard-pressed to blame them!” Fingers tightening over leather armrests, muscles tense in neck and shoulders, eyebrows canted upward. It had always been so very easy to torment him this way.

Still, Sherlock obediently calmed his restless hands, lacing his fingers to constrain them. John exhaled, relaxing visibly the moment he did so, and Sherlock couldn’t help but shake his head in bemusement; nearly eleven years of cohabitation, and an additional seven of close friendship, had done very little to soften the impact that his moods had on the other man. Whether the same could be said in reverse? Not that such a thing ever would be said, of course. That was a ridiculous notion, a thought so firmly rooted on sentiment as to be beneath consideration, much less expression … and yet.

“I presume you have some sort of plan,” Sherlock said, quite calmly. He avoided the word ‘ultimatum’, with the vague thought that if no one said it, the situation might not rise quite that extremely.

John spread his hands in an approximation of a shrug, and the thought died as quickly as it had been born; everyone had their dangerous points, and years of experience had proved that John was never so formidable as when he seemed willing to be reasonable.

And then, Sherlock began to vibrate.

He beamed.

“Just a moment!” It came out almost joyously as he rummaged through his pocket (two paperclips, one black rook, and the cap of a bic biro) and emerged with his phone, but his face fell the moment Sherlock saw the screen. In the chair, John seemed to perk up in response to the renewed slump of Sherlock’s shoulders, but he ignored that in favour of answering. One of these patient, greying men was the lesser of two evils, though at the moment it was difficult to decide exactly which.

“What is it?”

“Lestrade?” John asked in a low murmur.

Sherlock rolled his eyes.

“Obviously.”

“Sherlock?” The voice from the headset was muffled.

“ _Obviously._ ” Sherlock rolled his eyes again. “I had thought you were beyond this redundant inquiry by now, Lestrade.”

His response came in the form of a series of muted noises, plastic shifting against hair shifting against fabric as the man on the other end of the line instinctively adjusted his phone to its typical, neck-wrenching position. A phone call with a purpose, then, requiring the use of Lestrade’s hands while he spoke. Folios to flip through, references to check, facts to relay. Well, that at least stood a fraction of a chance of being interesting.

“How long ago was it taken?” Sherlock asked, as the noises faded. The audible pause on the other end was only moderately gratifying.

“How do you know I’m phoning you about an ‘it’?” Lestrade asked, his habitual curiosity masking something else in his voice. Across the room John cocked his head, unconsciously echoing the question.

Sherlock waved a dismissive hand, more for John's benefit than for than the Detective Inspector's.

“You’re not worried enough for it to be an abduction,” he said. “You wouldn’t bother getting your papers in order before speaking if you thought that time was of the essence - and you know that I do believe it to be, in that situation. You’re too anxious for it to be murder, though, and not simply because of the habitual strain violent crime ordinarily lays on your remarkably-active conscience. You wouldn’t have bothered to ask my name if you were truly panicked, but you are prone to unnecessary conversational elements when you are under pressure; a what, then, not a who.”

He had begun to pace, quick lengths back and froth in front of the window. “Theft is most likely, especially given Thursday’s auction; Picasso always seems to be irresistible this time of year. Whatever was stolen will need to be recovered quickly and quietly. And so I ask you, how long ago was it taken?”

There was potential here. Item recovery was something that didn’t end up on his plate nearly as often as the more pedantic expressions of criminal creativity, murder, arson, blackmail. That the crime had been perpetrated against an institution rather than an individual added another element of complexity. Oh, it wouldn’t keep him occupied for more than a day or two - nor could it, with the auction to be held in three days’ time, but it would be an improvement over cataloging soil samples for the third time.

John, damn the man, was looking amused.

From the phone, however, came an uncomfortable cough.

“You’re quite right about the auction, Sherlock,” Lestrade said, redundantly. “But … nothing’s been taken.”

Sherlock’s eyebrows climbed a fraction.

“Surely nothing has been mysteriously added to the collection.”

“No!” There was a laugh, but it faded quickly. “No, that would be easy enough for the tech boys to figure out, I’d imagine. No, I’m afraid this is more subtle than that.”

“I doubt that.” John’s eyebrows narrowed reprovingly; Sherlock turned his back to the man, staring out the window at the milling throng of sodden passersby. “If you tell me what it was that did happen, I may decide for myself.”

A sigh didn’t cover the soft sound of papers sliding against each other on a desk; Sherlock was never entirely sure how he felt about the detective’s steadfast adherence to paper in the face of technology’s relentless advancement. Once everything was in order, Lestrade cleared his throat.

“Two days ago,” he said. “Three people - Margery Anderson, Samuel Davis, and Gemma Harford, have you heard of her? Yeah, 'course you have, shouldn’t have asked - were approached by a man who claimed to be representing Christie’s, telling them that certain pieces were being auctioned independently from the rest of the collection -”

“Forgeries,” Sherlock cut in, nodding to himself.

“Exactly. It’s a series of sketches … three Vermeers, two Rembrandts, two Bosch … Bosches? Uh, one Cézanne and yeah, one Picasso. The, erm. fillet _au chien _.”__

“ _Fillette_ ,” Sherlock corrected absently. “1905, gouache on cardboard, yes. Interesting.”

He shot John a quelling look and brushed a pile of tabloids off of his desk, very nearly knocking over the remains of a Briggs-Rauscher oscillating reaction as he uncovered a laptop and slid into the nearest chair.

“How long ago were these three individuals approached?”

He opened up a string of browser windows, barely glancing at the results of each query or site before moving on to the next.

“Early last week,” Lestrade answered. “Mrs. Anderson and Mr. Davis were each approached at their workplaces by a tall, blonde young man in a dark suit. Miss Harford got the message from one of her personal assistants; she said she hadn’t seen the person who dropped it off. Either that or else she didn’t remember.”

“Likely someone hired from a messenger service.” Sherlock closed the lid of the laptop, rose, and moved back to the window again. “He left cards, I presume? I’ll need to take a look at one of the originals as soon as possible, although I doubt that it will be of any real use in solving your case.”

“I’ll see what I can do.” That sort of request had been met with opposition, once, but now Lestrade’s voice contained nothing more than weary resignation.

“The choice of targets is marginally more promising.” Sherlock tapped his fingers in a staccato rhythm against the sill. “The Dean of Oxford University Medical School, the Chairman of the Board at Barclays’, and of course dear Miss Harford, Britain’s current socialite distraction. Of course, given the value of the pieces in question any potential buyer would need to be reasonably wealthy, and therefore quite possibly influential. Still, it would be difficult to find three people more likely to attract attention.”

Lestrade made a snorting sound that contained more liquid than air, then swore.

“You might be advised to refrain from drinking your coffee until we’ve finished with this conversation,” Sherlock advised blandly.

“I’ll never get used to you doing that,” Lestrade complained. “Don’t tell me that you knew who the other two were off the top of your head. I won’t believe you.”

“I didn’t know that Margery Anderson had taken over for James Forthwrite at Oxford, no. I simply type at a reasonable speed, and am not dependent on a secretary if I want to find useful information.”

Lestrade gave an exasperated sigh.

“Obnoxious …” He reigned himself in with obvious effort. “Okay, so they’re prominent. What are you getting at?”

Sherlock sighed and threw himself down in his armchair.

“Generally, one creates a forgery because one wishes to sell it in lieu of the original, yes?” This part was always challenging; speak slowly, clearly, simplify already clear concepts down into their component parts - but not too far, modulate tone to avoid giving excessive offense. Even Lestrade, for all of their years of partnership, bristled if he decided that Sherlock was talking down to him. As though an alternative were possible.

“Yeah.” Lestrade sounded wary.

“Why, then, choose as prospective buyers three individuals who are under careful public scrutiny, who are known to have close relationships with the media and with law enforcement? Any one of them might have chosen to keep the incident quiet, but engaging with all three of them all but guarantees that the attempted crime will be brought to police attention within hours.”

“Hmm.”

“Indeed.”

“So … why would they do that, then?”

Sherlock rose to his feet in one smooth, fluid motion.

“Ah, but if I knew that, my dear Lestrade, I would already be able to tell you who it was you were looking for.”

He moved to the door, shouldering his way into the macintosh John had draped on the clothes horse on his way in. John’s eyebrows drew together in a truly impressive frown, and he spread his arms in an exasperated expression of incredulity.

 _My raincoat!_ he mouthed silently, beginning to rise from his chair, but Sherlock waved an impatient hand at him and he retreated back into the cushions with a groan.

“You could tell me already,” Lestrade was repeating back over the phone line. The soft scratching sound of a biro on 20 lb paper suggested methodical note-taking; summarizing what Sherlock had already said. “Does that mean you’ll help us out, then?”

Sherlock pursed his lips, transferring his phone to the other shoulder as he settled the raincoat in place.

“Of course,” he replied magnanimously. He dropped John’s wallet onto a pile of French and German crossword puzzles by the front door. He shoved two notebooks and a small pencil case into the pocket in its place. “You probably don’t realize it, Lestrade, but you may have actually stumbled upon the first half-interesting case I’ve seen in twenty-seven months.”

The Detective Inspector grunted.

“I’m not bringing you in on this to entertain you.”

“No, no, that is simply an incidental benefit, and one that you may feel free to disregard if you find my improved mental health somehow distasteful.”

It was still raining out, but the clouds on the southern horizon were a fractionally paler shade of gray. It would begin to clear shortly; just enough time to reacquaint himself with certain aspects of the landscape and track down one or two old contacts. Then it would be time to call in a very old favor from a very old enemy.

 

* * *

 

The inclement weather had warned away some of the less enthusiastic sightseers, and so Trafalgar Square was merely crowded rather than nearly-impassable. Tourists clustered together in groups, umbrellas thrust awkwardly over shoulders and into bags already filled to overflowing with t-shirts, miniature replicas of municipal landmarks, and overpriced sheets of plastic generously branded as ‘ponchos’. Organized tours followed their guides like sodden, varicoloured ducklings, while families unfortunate enough to have brought small children along on their afternoon’s adventure now begged and wheedled and dragged their recalcitrant charges across the square. Two groups of men were arguing loudly about football in Hebrew while an American family looked on in horror, clearly waiting for the inevitable display of terrorism.

The usual complement of buskers, panhandlers, caricaturists, and other street artists had their stations set up around the edges of the Square. Most of them were dressed for the weather in sturdy rain gear; a handful of small tents were erected over clusters of resigned-looking men and women, and one woman had her easel set up under a contraption that seemed to be made from old camera hoods sewn together over reinforced plastic sheeting.

Good; Adrian Larsson had always held an indulgent fondness for the light quality following an afternoon rain, and he’d been sketching the Landseer’s Lions for well over two decades now. If he wasn’t here already, he would likely be arriving shortly. Sherlock made a slow circuit of the Square, spine hunched to take a full three inches off of his height, hands deep in his pockets and a disinterested expression on his face. No sign of the little Swedish forger yet, so he made a second pass around and then settled down on the northern stairs to wait.

A small moleskine and a broken-off piece of charcoal emerged from various pockets, and Sherlock set his hands to work on gesture drawings while he began to mull over the problem. It wasn’t as good as a cigarette, of course; nothing was as good as a cigarette, the combination of chemical stimulation and ritualistic action that centered the mind and encouraged productive, focused thought. If his lungs had started to protest the abuse, that was simply a consequence he would have to accept; except that the public no longer viewed tobacco consumption as an individual problem. It had gotten to the point where it was more difficult to find an acceptable place to consume the required number of cigarettes for a given puzzle than the entire process was worth, and so Sherlock had reluctantly, indignantly, traded in the habit for this inferior substitute.

Several things were, of course, immediately apparent. First, so obvious as to hardly be worth conscious thought: the orchestrator of this little crime was connected with Thursday’s upcoming auction. An addendum to that: he was likely not directly affiliated with Christie’s. Sherlock grimaced - no, it was possible that he _was_ affiliated with Christie’s, and was also simply an idiot. Lestrade would like that, though Sherlock shuddered to think of the abuse of the criminal process that would occur in that case. He disapproved of crime, certainly, but that didn’t mean he enjoyed seeing it executed poorly.

As for the three targets, it was possible that they had each been chosen at random from a pool of influential locals, but it was not likely. Any list containing one of them in a position of prominence would not include the other two; socialites were simply not listed with deans of medicine in respectable sources, and Sherlock had checked his usual online sources to make sure that they hadn’t featured in some sort of piece about the “Fifteen Brits You Didn’t Know You Needed To Know” or some other such nonsense.

No, it was much more likely that the mind behind this - he would not yet say ‘mastermind’ - knew these individuals personally, at least casually. That would give Lestrade something to do, while Sherlock spent his time following more sensitive trails; the Picasso, for instance -

He grunted as a sharp knee collided with his left shoulder.

A pair of long legs wobbled past him on the stairs.

“What on earth are you doing?” their owner demanded. “Lying in wait for someone?”

A tall young man in his late teens, with thick-rimmed spectacles and his hair pulled up in the high, messy bun that seemed to be fashionable these days. All save the bottom two inches just above the neck which had, Sherlock noticed with disapproval, been shaved quite close to the scalp in a useless display of adolescent rebellion.

He raised an eyebrow.

“I hardly think that I can be accused of ‘lying’ anywhere,” he said, “as I am seated openly on an uncrowded section of the staircase, minding my own business. When, that is, I am not having to defend myself against those who would send me tumbling down..”

The adolescent youth tensed, shoulders squaring. He held a battered book in one hand, spine worn, once-gilded letters now merely indentations in the leather. Virgil did not deserve to be held so tightly in clenched first.

“You haven’t answered my question,” he bit off.

He was standing directly in front of Sherlock, closing off much of the view of the Square, clearly yearning for a fight. Sherlock lowered his eyebrow and pursed his lips.

“What I am doing here, you mean?”

“Exactly.”

“I am sketching,” he said, holding up the moleskine and charcoal in case additional evidence proved necessary. “Or I would be, if you were not blocking my line of sight. If you will excuse me.”

He set charcoal to paper and cocked his head expectantly. The young man stared at him for several seconds, anger and embarrassment losing out to curiosity on his thin, angular face. Then with a snort of derision that only a disillusioned teenager can produce, he sidled left and retreated several steps up the stairway. The soft sigh of rubber, the scrape of rivets and denim against stone indicated that he had seated himself up there. Well and good; what he did outside of Sherlock’s sight was his own business.

The Square’s population ebbed and flowed over the course of the next hour as families replaced families, tour groups replaced tour groups. Sherlock tracked three drug deals, one runaway child, and seven extramarital affairs as he mentally traced through the extensive webs connecting Anderson, Davis and Harford. Anderson and Harford were both members of several clubs, and Harford and Davis both had summer homes in the same seaside village. The closest connection that Sherlock could find between Anderson and Davis, however, was a fondness for philately, and it was hard to imagine the young Miss Gemma Harford devoting her afternoons to a stamp collection.

“If they haven’t shown up yet they’re probably not coming today,” a clear tenor voice said behind him. “You don’t really get much other than tour groups this late on a Sunday.”

Sherlock blinked.

He slowly removed the charcoal from the page and closed the book, then pivoted to look up at the young man who was peering down at him over the tops of his knees.

“What did you say?”

“Sorry, are you hard of hearing?” The tone was courteous, but there was a hint of triumph in the corners of his mouth and eyes. “I said, if you’re waiting for someone, you might want to give up because they’re probably not going to be coming today. This late on a Sunday, you don’t usually get many locals.”

“There is nothing wrong with my hearing,” Sherlock said coolly, “though I am lacking somewhat in patience. Why do you think that I’m waiting for someone?”

The teen stretched his legs out in front of him, and Sherlock felt his own kneecaps twinge in sympathy. His joints had never liked the rain, and the disagreement was only getting worse as time continued its inevitable progression.

“I thought it was obvious,” Sherlock's lanky observer said, sliding down first one step and then a second with aggressive disregard for the seat of his trousers. “Your sketches, you keep sweeping back and forth across the Square. Aside from the obvious distractions - the little girl with the enormous umbrella, the dog chasing the woman in the spike heels - you were mostly focused on shorter men. There,” he reached down to tap an abstract collection of lines, “and there. You were drawing them while you checked to see if they were the person you were expecting.”

Slowly, carefully, Sherlock lowered his book out of the reach of prying fingers.

“My god,” he said dryly, “it can think.”

The young man’s lip curled and he snatched his hand back.

“My god,” he bit off, “it can recognize another human being when it’s hit over the head with one.” He rose sharply to his feet, dusting the backs of his legs. “And here I thought that your generation was all about manners and proper decorum.”

He shoved the worn old Latin book into one of the pockets of his utility jacket and stormed down the stairs.

Sherlock felt himself tense for a moment, and then he relaxed. Adolescence was a time for setting oneself against the standards established by those who came before, a time of bristling hormones and misplaced confidence. This particular example might have some potential when he grew out of his awkward edges, and perhaps he was right: if Larsson were going to have come this afternoon, he would already be here.

Sherlock closed his book and stowed it in his own pockets, trying to decide if a curry would be sufficient to sooth John’s irritation about the borrowed raincoat. He looked up to see that his unwanted companion had stopped half way down the steps and was now staring at him in open incredulity. Sherlock sighed and swept his hair back from his face.

“Young man, I -”

“’ _Young man_ ’!”

Sherlock blinked at the passion infusing those two words. The youth’s face reddened with rage, but there were the beginnings of triumph blooming as well.

“’Young man’?” He was quickly building up steam. “No wonder you’re not making the papers anymore, if that’s all that’s left of ‘the best mind in Britain’.”

And he reached up, caught the tie that held up the bun, and let a cascade of long blonde hair flow down over his - over _her_ shoulders.


	2. Observations

Mary Russell was beginning to suspect that she should abandon her wish for a quiet, peaceful train ride.

The three men had boarded the train at Harlow Mill, two of them displaying the signs of mild alcohol use. They had immediately taken advantage of a number of empty seats to relax and make themselves comfortable, and over the course of the next ten minutes they had grown increasingly rowdy. It had taken more and more of Mary’s attention to keep her mind focused on reading her battered copy of the _Aeneid_. Rude jokes and raucous laughter punctuated Latin verse, growing more and provocative each time they went unchallenged. When a trio of women, teachers from the looks of their jackets and their hair, eventually did attempt to quiet the men down they were met with crude dismissal.

Mary endured this with a steadily rising sense of irritation. It was infuriating, watching three individuals so totally dominate an ostensibly public space, seeing the lack of effective response. On the other hand, as her aunt would undoubtedly be quick to point out, it was not Mary’s job to tackle every perceived flaw within British society. Not her job to _meddle_.

She focused on the feeling of her breath entering and leaving her body, and on the conjugation of irregular verbs. 

When the pair of teenaged girls got on the train, though, the hair on the back of Mary’s neck immediately began to rise. One of the girls was tall and broad-shouldered, a football or rugby player, with her hair pulled back in an efficient ponytail and an appealing, freckled face. Her friend was much shorter, dark and long-haired, with the lean build of a dancer. When the men set eyes on the shorter of the two, their reaction was as predatory as any Mary had ever seen on a nature documentary. Three hungry gazes followed the two girls as they chose seats and settled down with their backs to Mary, talking quietly and oblivious to the attentions following them.

A tense peace held for two and a half minutes, while the train pulled out of Royden station and continued south toward London. Then the man who did not appear to have been drinking, a square-jawed bully with close-cropped hair and a sharp smile, pushed himself out of his seat and squeezed his way down the isle to loom over the pair. He braced his arm on the back of the seat in front of them, neatly blocking them in with his body.

“Hey, beautiful.”

His attention was fixed on the smaller of the two girls, whose shoulders went immediately tense. Her friend turned and said something that Mary couldn’t hear; the man laughed dismissively and dark-haired girl shrank down in her seat. The three teachers further down the car looked incensed, and murmured amongst themselves, but they made no move to offer assistance.

Aeneas’ adventures in Sicily were growing less and less compelling as the tension in the train grew.

“ - going to meet my dad for lunch,” the smaller girl was saying reluctantly.

The man chuckled unpleasantly.

“If you were _my_ daughter, I wouldn’t let you out of my sight,” he said.

The other girl scoffed. 

“What does that even mean?”

Mary closed her eyes and took one deep, slow breath. She closed her book and slipped it into one of her utility jacket’s many pockets, then unfolded herself from her seat.

“Is that really what counts as a good pickup line nowadays?” she asked with as much disdain as she could muster. Her voice was innately low-pitched, and the effort of keeping it near the bottom of her natural range added a slight hoarseness that suited her purposes nicely. “You’re right on one count, at least; you certainly look old enough to be her father.”

The man turned, and the attempt at a flirtatious smile melted immediately into a scowl.

“Bugger off, punk,” he growled, and Mary took a moment to enjoy a familiar amusement. An eighth of an inch over six feet tall and blessed with little in the way of feminine curves, Mary had discovered early in her budding adolescence that she had much greater success choosing her clothing from the men’s section of stores than she did from the women’s. It hadn’t taken her very much longer to notice that she received significantly less unwelcome scrutiny and intervention when people thought that she was a scrawny, effeminate boy than she did when they took her for a gangly, under-developed girl. A slightly different way of putting up her hair, spectacles from one side of the store instead of the other, and it was amazing the assumptions that people started making.

Now, all she had to do was make sure that he didn’t start questioning those first impressions.

She squared her shoulders and lifted her chin. Her antagonist was just under six feet tall, with an artificial tan and bright white teeth. Black hair was cut short and slicked back away from his face, suit jacket new and ill fitting. His wristwatch was a large, brassy Rolex replica.

“I suppose your charms stopped working on women your own age a long time ago.” 

“Mind your own business,” he snapped back. His two friends finally noticed the disruption; a tall, lean blond half-rose from his seat to cock his head inquisitively while his companion, a near clone of the man facing Mary, folded his arms and scowled.

“I was trying to,” Mary said tartly. “You’ve certainly worked hard enough to make yourself impossible to ignore, though. I guess the sort of genius that thinks that _incest_ is flirtatious would need to resort to non-verbal cues whenever possible.”

The man growled - literally _growled_ , low in his throat.

Parallel thrills of both triumph and terror told Mary that she was probably on the right track. In theory, this shouldn’t escalate too badly. The protocols that governed interpersonal relationships put limits on the sort of thing a man like that could do to the sort of guy he clearly assumed Mary to be. His own conception of honour should also help; part of the definition of this particular brand of masculinity involved not needing to pummel scrawny kids with glasses into the ground.

That was the theory, although it wasn’t quite as reassuring a shield as Mary might have liked. She forced herself to remain motionless as the man took an aggressive step towards her, only retreating after he had stopped moving. He was no longer completely blocking the girls’ seats, but they would have to squeeze bodily past him to get away, and neither one of them looked like they were willing to touch the man. 

Mary didn’t blame them.

“If you don’t start watching what you’re saying …” The man trailed off ominously.

“You’ll what?” Mary took another step backwards. “Complain to your father? He might have been able to guarantee you job security somewhere in the labyrinth of middle management, but I doubt there’s very much he can do about a conversation on the train.”

The man opened his mouth, froze for a moment, and then closed it as a familiar bemusement crossed his features.

“What? How do you …”

Mary gave a long-suffering sigh.

“You obviously take care of your appearance,” she began, “to the extent that you focus more on what you think looks impressive than on what’s actually good for you. You go to tanning salons, so you clearly aren’t very worried about long-term health consequences, and you think that looking like a bodyguard from an American mafia drama is a good thing, which means you can’t be very clever. That’s probably why you’ve never been able to get out of the associate-manager level at whatever interchangeable technology company you work for. The ‘Bros Who Code’ keychain hanging off of your briefcase doesn’t really add much of an air of professionalism, if you were wondering.”

Of course, it wasn’t that simple, at least not to most people. Mary had always had a knack for noticing things that other people didn’t see, for putting pieces together to make a puzzle out of ostensibly random chaos. It wasn’t, generally speaking, a talent that endeared her to others, and she had learned that she was usually better off keeping her observations to herself.

Occasionally, though, being able to throw someone off of their guard, even irritate them, was a handy skill to have in one’s back pocket. 

Her antagonist was staring at her, clearly trying to read her, and just as clearly having very little luck making heads or tails of this cheeky stranger with no survival instinct. 

“You think she’s gonna be impressed with you getting involved?” he asked, finally. “Think maybe she’ll thank you for being all chivalrous? Give you a nice kiss?”

Now, _that_ was an alarming possibility.

Mary rolled her eyes.

“Don’t be juvenile.”

The man’s face reddened alarmingly.

“Now you listen to me, kid.” He narrowed his eyes, taking a step forward. And then he stumbled, as the train slowed for Broxbourne. He glared, but kept quiet as the doors opened and an elderly couple boarded at the end of the car. 

Mary took a third slow step back, gaze locked with his, as the train resumed motion. He was no longer blocking the girls’ seats, and they had taken the opportunity while the train was stopped to slide out and hurry down to the opposite end of the car. The two men still sitting in the middle hadn’t made any move to interfere with them, apparently content to remain as spectators. They seemed to have decided that this was their friend’s chase, not theirs, so Mary tentatively took them out of the equation. 

That just left her with one irate, self-entitled man who was twice her size, and looking for a conquest of some sort. The longer it took him to notice that his chosen prey had gotten away, the more likely it was that he’d take out his frustration on the nearest target. Which hadn’t exactly been the point of this whole thing; Mary hadn’t actually thought her way through to the end of her little plan before she’d embarked upon it. She thought, though, that at least she was in a better position to take care of herself than the dark, slight girl would have been.

Now, all she had to do was figure out how to get out of this mess.

“What’s your name?” she asked abruptly.

The man blinked.

“What?”

“Your name,” Mary repeated in the measured tone one takes when addressing a young child. “If you’re going to start throwing punches, I’m going to want to be able to file a thorough report.” She knuckled her spectacles with a thoughtful frown. “I suppose I ought to take these off as well, hadn’t I? That ring you’re wearing looks nasty, and I’d really rather not get glass in my eye.”

He looked at her warily, his eyebrows drawing together. Mary ignored him, turning her attention to his crisp, white shirt.

“Do you have a spare one of those?” she asked curiously, gesturing to the neat row of buttons. “That’s a nice shirt, and I’ve got thin skin - literally, I mean, not metaphorically. I don’t really bruise, I just go straight to bleeding, and then I’m all skin and bones, so things tend to get messy fast.”

“What?” He sounded confused now, as well as angry. Good.

Mary sighed.

“Wherever you’re going, I can’t imagine you went to all that effort to look polished and intimidating if appearances didn’t matter. I guess it’ll still be impressive if you show up covered in fresh bloodstains, but I’m also pretty sure that’s not what your father had in mind when he said he wanted to you to help impress his friends. And most restaurants don’t exactly _forbid_ it in their dress codes, but it’s rather generally frowned upon to walk in looking like you’ve been witness to an ax murder.”

There was a lot of guess-work going into that, but Mary watched enough of it hit home that she didn’t think the man was paying attention to the details she got wrong. She had the advantage of being clear-headed, after all, at least relatively speaking. He, on the other hand …

Well, that was the problem with a strategy that involved trying to pull the rug out from someone. It really was pretty much impossible to tell how someone was going to react when you changed things up on them too many times. She hoped that the absurdity of the situation, the social protocols of the train, his size and his pride, her sheer unwavering _pluck_ would be enough to make him back down. If they weren’t, though, she’d never thrown a successful punch in her life, and she didn’t think that an accurate throwing arm was going to do her much good in these close quarters.

If all else failed, she could always just kick him in the groin.

“You’re not worth it,” the man said abruptly.

Just as quickly, he reached out and shoved Mary hard in the chest with both large hands. 

He was a big man, and it was not a light push; Mary stumbled backward several steps and connected painfully with the edge of the seat while her poor, battered Virgil tried its best to dig its way up through her left kidney. She bit back a pathetic yelp of pain, not wanting to give him the satisfaction. That might have been the whole point of this entire exercise, but it still galled her to watch someone smirk down at her the way the man was doing now.

The self-satisfied nod he gave her made her grind her teeth as she lowered herself into the nearest seat.

“Teach you to stay out of other people’s business,” he muttered, and then he turned his back on her and made his way back to his seat. Mary watched warily, but he made no move toward the two girls, only began speaking with his friends in low tones. Unpleasant bursts of laughter rose occasionally for the next several minutes, and then the conversation shifted away from masculine posturing to less charged topics, and she could no longer distinguish their words from the general noises of the train.

They were three minutes outside of Tottenham Hale when the two girls at the far end of the car started to get their bags and stand. Mary, legs folded up against the back of the seat in front of her, had been using Anaeas as a poor substitute for painkillers against the throbbing aches in her side and lower back. She lowered the book to watch the girls pass the three men; the game over, none of the men even bothered to look up to acknowledge them. The taller girl still shot them a withering glare as she walked by, though, and Mary smiled. 

A rugby player, Mary decided, she was probably sixteen years old. The shorter one had the build of a dancer, but not the musculature. A cheerleader, maybe, a hobbyist rather than a dedicated athlete. She looked older than her friend, but most of that was cosmetics; contoured cheekbones, eyeliner, mascara. Mary thought that she was actually the younger of the two.

“Hey.”

The two girls approached Mary and stopped beside her seat, looking awkward.

“Um …” The shorter girl fell silent with an appealing look at her friend.

“I’m Evie,” the taller one offered, adjusting a large sports bag over one shoulder. “This is Nadra. We just wanted to say thanks. For what you did, I mean. You didn’t have to get involved like that …”

“I’m sorry you got hurt,” Nadra chimed in with a frown. “I don’t know how you did it, it almost looked like you were daring him to take a swing, but I’m glad he didn’t.”

Mary shrugged, feeling suddenly uncomfortable. 

“Guys like that expect people to treat them like they’re tough,” she explained, settling lower in her jacket. “They don’t know what to do with people who aren’t afraid of them.”

Nadra shook her head, nerves evidently banished.

“He could’ve …” she gestured vaguely at Mary’s face.

“Unlikely,” Mary replied. “It’s easier to tell from the outside. And anyway, he needed to know it wasn’t okay to do that sort of thing.”

The train was slowing, the greenery on either side of the track giving way to the low carpet of russet that made up the London landscape as they approached Tottenham Hale station. Mary lowered her knees and rummaged in one pocket for a suitable bookmark. The two girls noticed her moving and checked the windows as well, then exchanged a glance.

“Listen,” Evie said, “I don’t know what you’re doing later, but there’s a group of us meeting up at a club tonight if you want to join us.”

Mary felt herself flush abruptly. Nadra laughed, sounding pleased rather than mocking. She reached a hand into her bag and came out with a pencil and a scrap of pale blue paper.

“It’s right near Chinatown,” she said as she wrote. “A jazz club, my cousin works there. We’re supposed to be meeting at eight, so that means people will probably start showing up at nine … what’s your name? I’ll tell Sabir to let you in.”

The train was slowing and the normal answer, Mary knew, would be impossible to give without at least thirty seconds of explanation. Well, this was hardly the first time she’d gone with the simpler option.

“Russell,” she said with the little nod and shrug that doubled as both a smile and a handshake. She took the scrap of blue paper and slipped it between the pages of the Virgil; Nadra had written her name and a phone number as well as directions to the club. 

Evie smiled as the doors slid open.

“Well … thanks for not being a creeper, Russell.”

“Yeah.” Nadra flashed a cheerful smile as she turned to follow her friend. “Maybe I’ll see you later, yeah?”

“Maybe.”

Mary sat in contemplation for several long seconds before she slid out of her own seat and followed them off of the train.

 

* * *

 

The trip into London had been spontaneous and reactionary, the response to several days of frustration. 

The wicked female caregiver was a tired figure in literature and folklore, one that Mary was therefore reluctant to lend any particular credence. Her mother’s sister, though, was a spiteful woman of limited talents, who had treated her sudden custodianship of the young Mary Russell some four years ago as little more than a great inconvenience that happened to come with a new house and a monthly stipend. Mary had, she was willing to admit, not been a particularly easy child to get along with in the first few months. Still, that hardly seemed like justification for the perverse pleasure the woman appeared to take in denying Mary all but the basic necessities, in needling her endlessly, in turning life into a series of battles that could never be won.

The weapon of choice this week had been inconsistency, and it had proved to be one against which Mary had very few defenses. One day, it had seemed that her aunt was dismayed by Mary’s limited worldview and experience. She had appeared to believe that Mary needed to take some time abroad in order to correct this character failing. The next day, though, had been filled with scathing rebukes about the unreasonable costs of children traveling when there was still so much to learn at home; she had no recollection of ever suggesting anything to the contrary, although if Mary wanted to waste money wandering around when she was an adult, that was her own concern. Then, of course, there had been the question of Mary’s limbs, which were too long. She ought to have been enrolled in dance classes as a child, Mary’s aunt informed her sternly, because as it was she was far too clumsy. It was too late to begin lessons now, though. If only she were five or six inches shorter, they might be able to do something about it.

“I’ll see about shrinking, then, shall I?” Mary had offered sweetly, and slammed her bedroom door on the admonition that surely followed.

The problem was that Mary couldn’t seem to convince her aunt of the importance of facts, and she had absolutely no idea what to do in a debate where the truth was irrelevant.

It had finally come to a head that morning in an argument about parkour, of all things; an amateur tournament in London sparked a scornful comment about ‘runaway circus hooligans’ that Mary had been unable to ignore, until twenty minutes later she found herself nearly vibrating with frustration as she tried to explain the significance of the distinction between ‘ _scrabble_ ’ and ‘ _scramble_ ’. The absurdity hit her all of a sudden, along with the realisation that she couldn’t remember when she had started arguing, nor did she actually care about the subject in question…

And so between one sentence and the next, Mary had simply risen from her place at the table, grabbed her coat and the nearest unread book that she could find, and left for London. She assembled something of a plan while she was walking to the train station: she clearly needed some time away from her aunt, for both of their sakes, and she had at least four friends who had told her that she should let them know if she was going to be in the city for the night. She could unwind with pleasant company, a good book, maybe an old movie and a glass or two of something from an unattended liquor cabinet. By the next morning, she should be in a much better state to face the world.

Except that at this point, rather than relaxing with a friend she had picked a fight with a man three times her width and was not entirely sure whether or not she’d won. The morning’s edginess was balanced nicely by a warm glow of righteousness, but Mary was also beginning to feel a bit like a three-day-old balloon as adrenaline stopped fueling her, and the aches in her side and back weren’t making matters any better. 

It was tempting to find somewhere warm and dry and just curl up - maybe even turn around and go back home where things were familiar, for all of their toxicity. Unfortunately, Mary knew herself too well for that. If she stopped moving, stopped thinking, she would just be a knot of pain and tension in a few hours. An evening spent at a jazz club actually sounded appealing - but night was a long ways off yet. A museum or an art gallery would seem like the obvious solution to her problem, but Mary found the notion eminently unappealing.

At least the rain was letting up.

 

* * *

 

The inclement weather had warned away many of the less enthusiastic sightseers, and so Trafalgar Square was merely crowded rather than nearly impassable. The stones were still slick and cold, the sky was overcast and grey, and the faces of those who remained all bore a characteristic note of strained joviality as they forced themselves to enjoy their day of English Cultural Experience. Families that had undoubtedly started the day full of unbridled cheer now struggled to hold bags in one hand, umbrellas in another, children in third and fourth hands and greasy takeaway containers of chips in a fifth, whether or not that many limbs were available. 

Those parents who had retained control of their cameras followed the few children who still had any energy left as they dashed from lion to lion. Those who had succumbed in a moment of weakness now watched with desperate, cheerful smiles as precocious nine year olds raced thither and yon with Nikons in tow, or listened politely to surprisingly detailed commentary from their budding shutterbugs.

Safe between the bronze hooves of King George IV’s noble steed, Mary watched the activity below her with bemused respect and wiped a drop of water off of her nose. She doubted that she was supposed to be up here, but so far the few people who had bothered to do more than glance at the statue had only frowned at her disapprovingly. Another reason she often dressed as she did; most people assumed from Mary’s clothing that someone else had probably told her to go on her way, and that she had probably already told them where they could put their suggestion. Very few people liked the idea of enduring fruitless abuse, and so they tended to leave her alone.

Mary had always loved people-watching, especially in places like this where the people were all focused on watching things themselves. A couple sitting at one of the fountains desperately tried to pretend that they were having a romantic afternoon, in spite of their shivering; on the rim of the fountain opposite them, a middle-aged man and a young woman in her early twenties were having a fight that she was enjoying, and he wasn’t. Two elderly men in matching tweed overcoats came very close to crashing into each other, and proceeded to engage in an enthusiastic conversation about local architecture in lieu of apology. 

It was nearly impossible to hold onto a sour mood under these conditions. The only problem, Mary reflected, was that between the fight and the weather she really hadn’t had very much of a chance to read. The plinth she was sitting on might have been a convenient hiding spot, but the horse above her was collecting all of the moisture in the air and sending it down in great dramatic drops that would wreak havoc on her poor Virgil’s pages if she took it out now.

When it didn’t decide to dump them right down the back of her neck instead.

Mary shuddered, glared uselessly up at the uncaring belly of the horse, and then dropped reluctantly off of the plinth directly into the middle of a flock of pigeons.

“Oh, shush, you,” she told the cooing, fluttering mass, waving a hand to scatter them further away. Bird droppings would _not_ improve the afternoon - which was turning out to be quite beautiful, actually. Mary circled the Square slowly, eyes fixed on the sky. The light filtered through the clouds in complex layers that fairly defined the notion of a picture being worth a thousand words, with her pigeons conveniently backlit off to one side. At times like this she occasionally wished that she were the sort of person who carried a camera around.

At times like this, she occasionally wished that she were the sort of person who knew how to use a camera for anything more sophisticated than selfies with friends and ironic pictures of burnt toast. In a bout of perverse humour, the universe had chosen to bless Mary with quite a good critical artistic eye, and the creative gifts of a particularly incompetent gibbon. It was not a combination that led to delusions of grandeur, or any other sort. 

Still, there was nothing that said she couldn’t appreciate it in person. Another hour or so and it would get dark, and then she could call Mark or Terry and see if either of them were free for the evening. Maybe one of them would be willing to go with her to that jazz club, keep her company in the event that - 

Mary took a step and hit something where there should have been open air. Her other foot was already moving, and she wheeled her arms desperately to avoid plummeting headfirst to near-certain doom. 

She reeled and managed to find her balance, then turned with the intention of apologizing only to find herself facing the most critical gaze she had ever encountered. Mary felt herself immediately reduced to insignificance. Worse, she found herself unable to summon any of the defences she had forged in years of battles fought against her aunt.

When defense fails, what remains is attack.

“What on earth are you doing?” Mary demanded, glaring down at the man. “Lying in wait for someone?”

It wasn’t fair, of course, but that wasn’t the point. This tall, slim, greying heron of a man hadn’t just had the misfortune of placing himself in her way, he’d also chosen to judge her for it as though it were a matter of character rather than simple luck. Mary could see him looking her over, filing her away, banishing her from his mind before his eyes had even left her. He raised an eyebrow, and his mouth slid into a tired, condescending smile. 

“I hardly think that I can be accused of ‘lying’ anywhere,” he said, “as I am seated openly on an unpopulated section of the staircase minding my own business. When, that is, I am not having to defend myself against those who would send me tumbling down.”

It should have been an innocuous phrase, if not particularly politely delivered. If he had almost anything else, or even the same thing in a slightly different tone, Mary would have made a bruised apology and phoned a friend, and that would have been the end of it. But her aunt’s words still spun circles in her mind, day after day of spiteful, pointless arguments in which any little word might or might not become a bewildering, nonsensical battleground: ‘ _I said_ skyscraper _, child, not_ high-rise _, don’t be ridiculous_ ’; ‘funds _? Oh, did you think I meant_ finances _? No, child, no, this was metaphorically speaking …_ ’ 

Hyperbole and misdirection were tools of war, strategic attacks that demanded either retaliation or surrender. Mary had stumbled into this man, yes, but _she_ was the one who had nearly fallen, and now he was trying to claim victim status? He needed to defend himself against her, did he?

She turned slowly.

“You haven’t answered my question.”

“What I am doing here, you mean?”

His tone was flat, tired, and his gaze kept jumping from one side of her to the other as though the only interest Mary held for this man was in the things that she prevented him from seeing. Beyond simply not caring about the nerve he’d hit, he seemed downright oblivious to it. 

“Exactly.”

“I am sketching,” he said, lifting both hands slowly to reveal a small book and a short stick of charcoal. “Or I would be, if you were not blocking my line of sight. If you will excuse me.”

He set charcoal to paper and cocked his head expectantly.

Mary stared at him for a moment, waiting for further explanation. It became quickly clear, however, that none was forthcoming; the expression of bland disinterest was too perfect to be anything other than a mockery, and she was damned if she was going to stand there and let him laugh at her. She let herself indulge in a disgusted snort and then stepped off to one side, clearing the man’s field of vision.

She should just continue on her way.

That was obviously the only sane thing to do. Today was clearly just a bad day, and the best thing she could do for it would be to get out of chance’s way before it could decide to pull another trick on her. First the boor on the train, and now this supercilious artist, the last thing she needed was for the third time to try and come up lucky.

Except that he wasn’t behaving like an artist.

For one thing, he was doing nothing to shield his book from the mist or the occasional drop of rain that still blew by, smudging charcoal and warping paper. He sketched in strange places on the page, too, starting in the corners and then crowding the center binding, moving apparently at random. As far as Mary could tell, it would be impossible for him to make any kind of cohesive image out of the mess of scrawls …

Reluctantly, she moved up several steps and sat down to watch the strange man.

The easiest thing to do would be to write as a random doodler keeping his hands busy while he waited for something to do. But seated now behind the man, Mary could see most of what he was drawing, and over the course of the next hour or so it became apparent that he was no amateur with the charcoal. His drawings weren’t doodles, or even sketches; they looked more like the gesture drawings she had never been able to get the hang of in Year Nine art class. He didn’t draw any buildings, or any of the distinctive fountains and sculptures that made Trafalgar Square so iconic. Why would someone come to a place like this only to draw the sort of things you could find anywhere?

Mary puzzled it over for several long minutes, and then she cleared her throat.

“If they haven’t shown up yet they’re probably not coming today,” she called down. “You don’t really get much other than tour groups this late on a Sunday.”

The man’s long-fingered hands froze on his paper. Slowly, very slowly, the charcoal rose from the page. The book closed. The man turned, looking up at her with his mouth open in a way that made him look like a strange combination of an eagle and a fish. Mary fought the urge to giggle.

“What did you say?”

“Sorry, are you hard of hearing?” The look of astonishment was fading quickly, but Mary held onto her feeling of satisfaction. “I said, if you’re waiting for someone, you might want to give up because they’re probably not going to be coming today. This late on a Sunday, you don’t usually get many locals.”

“There is nothing wrong with my hearing,” the man replied icily, “though I am lacking somewhat in patience. Why do you think that I’m waiting for someone?”

Mary stretched her legs out in front of her, taking a moment to enjoy the rare feeling of a clear victory.

“I thought it was obvious,” she said, although this would make the analysis she had done on the train look like a party trick. She slid down two steps so that the man no longer had to strain his neck to see her, and gestured at the square in front of them. “Your sketches, you keep sweeping back and forth across the Square. Aside from the obvious distractions - the little girl with the enormous umbrella, the dog chasing the woman in the spike heels - you were mostly focused on shorter men. There,” she reached down to tap a collection of lines that had once been a portly man in a business suit, “and there. You were drawing them while you checked to see if they were the person you were expecting.”

The man frowned, pulling his sketchbook out of Mary’s reach.

“My god,” he murmured mockingly, “it can think.”

Mary flinched back.

“My god,” she snapped, “it can recognize another human being when its hit over the head with one.” She pushed herself to her feet, scraping the dirt off of the backs of her legs with one hand, the other hand clenched around the Latin text she had forgotten she was holding. “And here I thought that your generation was all about manners and proper decorum.”

Mary stormed down the stairs, already regretting the last phrase, wishing that she had managed to think of a better way to convey her disgust. She would replay this encounter over her in her head for days, maybe even weeks, trying to figure out exactly what had happened. Trying to figure out what she could have done differently to gain the bastard’s respect - because that was the beauty of human nature. The minute you noticed that you’d lost someone’s respect was often the minute that you realized you wanted it. 

No matter that she’d never met the man before. He wasn’t a celebrity, or any of the scientists or philosophers that Mary had grown up reading about under the covers late at night. He was a stranger on a rainy day. And yet this lonely, middle-aged, grey-eyed man with his strange drawings and his gaze that read her entire life in a glance …

Mary froze in the middle of the stairway.

Her mother had always been a fan of the True Crime genre. Her father had said he disapproved of the morbidity of those books, but he had always believed in the importance of staying on top of current events. Mary had grown up with an appreciation of the great deductive minds, both fictional and nonfictional; Hercule Poirot and Sam Spade sat next to Dave Toschi and Marcel Guillaume in the family’s esteem; her brother had spent a year insisting that he wanted to be Dr Watson when he grew up.

So she had heard of the Greatest Detective in All of Britain. Of course she had. And while she’d always assumed that the stories were probably exaggerated, she’d still felt an almost patriotic sense of pride when his name was mentioned in her youth.

And here she was, staring up at him on the soggy steps at Trafalgar Square, having just made as much of a fool of herself as she ever had in her life.

Mary tensed, waiting for the inevitable intellectual slap that would send her flying.

And then he looked at her, and rather than being keen or merciless those grey eyes were tired, even tolerant. He pushed rain-damp hair away from his face and sighed.

“Young man, I-”

“’ _Young man_ ’!”

That did it.

No, Mary didn’t look particularly feminine at the moment. Yes, this was the fourth time today that someone had explicitly thought that she was a boy and yes, the first three times she had actually deliberately been encouraging the misperception. But there was a difference between three strangers, three random idiots on a train, and this man. 

The fire that surged in her startled her with its ferocity. Mary fought the desire to grin defiance as she looked up, both literally and figuratively, at this man who had accidentally tossed his gauntlet down the stairs. 

“’Young man’?” she repeated. “No wonder you’re not making the papers anymore, if that’s all that’s left of ‘the best mind in Britain’.”

And she reached up and caught the tie that held up her bun, releasing the fall of long blonde hair that tumbled down over her shoulders.

**Author's Note:**

> While almost all of these words are my own, I did lift some of the dialogue directly from the book that inspired this re-imagining: _The Beekeeper's Apprentice,_ by Laurie R. King. Credit for the wordplay in the encounter on the stairs is mostly hers.


End file.
